Just so you know what we're up to: Three familiar larks, a bonus lark, and (oh yes!) Death and a maiden

Alauda (the Eurasian or Oriental skylark)

"[Larks] have more elaborate calls than most birds, and often extravagant songs given in display flight. These melodious sounds (to human ears), combined with a willingness to expand into anthropogenic habitats -- as long as these are not too intensively managed -- have ensured larks a prominent place in literature and music, especially the Skylark in northern Europe and the Crested Lark and Calandra Lark in southern Europe." -- Wikipedia

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS: The Lark Ascending (romance for
violin and orchestra)

Jean Pougnet, violin; London Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Adrian Boult, cond. EMI, recorded in Abbey Road Studio No. 1, Oct. 21, 1952

Hugh Bean, violin; New Philharmonia Orchestra, Sir Adrian Boult, cond. EMI, recorded in Abbey Road Studio No. 1, Mar. 1, 1967

[NOTE: Sir Adrian Boult (1889-1983) of course had a warm relationship with Ralph Vaughan Williams, and remains for me on the whole his most persuasive recorded exponent. And much as I love the more spacious and colorful 1967 recording (which was my first Lark Ascending), with a suitably engaged performance of the solo violin part by New Philharmonia concertmaster (among his wide range of musical activities) Hugh Bean (1929-2003), I'm happy to have as well the more streamlined 1952 one, which though mono still sounds awfully good, and has a really subtly inflected solo performance by Jean Pougnet (1907-1968), whose unsummarizably diverse personal and professional history is worth looking into. -- Ed.]

by Ken

A couple of further projects cropped up in last week's, er, post, "Taking our good old time with the Gabrieli String Quartet." Yes, I know, I'm still supposed to be going over the whole thing to make a proper post out of all the ingredients, and I really, really still mean to -- any day now, or maybe any week. What mattered most to me was that the music was, or at least should have been (I make no assumptions about what's there till I muster the courage to look at it), all in place.


FIRST, WE'RE IN THE GRIP OF . . . LARKMANIA!

If you were here last week, you may recall hearing, nestled in a group of (mostly) string-quartet slow movements played by the Gabrieli:

HAYDN: String Quartet in D, Op. 64, No. 5 (The Lark):
i. Allegro moderato
ii. Adagio cantabile

Gabrieli Quartet (Kenneth Sillito and Brendan O'Reilly, violins; Ian Jewel, viola; Keith Harvey, cello). Chandos, recorded in The Maltings, Snape (Surrey), England, Feb. 13-15, 1986

I made a stab at explaining the exception to the slow-movement rule:

In the case of the Haydn Lark Quartet, I've broken the rule -- well, it's my rule -- of "slow movements only." What happened was, I went ahead and made a clip of the Adagio cantabile, then paused, reminding myself that the opening movement of the Lark is one of my favoritest pieces of music in the whole world, and couldn't resist going back in and making a clip of it too, and decided what the heck?, why can't we have both, just this once? It's my rules, remember.

Which prompted this historical digression:

WANNA HEAR SOMETHING FUNNY? (HA HA!)

A ways back in time, I remembered, I did a whole post about "lark music," focusing on three specimens: the opening movement of Haydn's Lark Quartet, Fenton's gorgeous aria "Horch, die Lerche singt im Hain" from Nicolai's Merry Wives of Windsor, and Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending. I couldn't find it in the era of the stand-alone Sunday Classics blog, then rolled up my sleeves and dived into the Down with Tyranny archive, and much to my surprise, I found it! "Sunday Classics: Who can resist the 'elaborate' and 'extravagant' song of the high-flying lark?," from August 2009.

Only, there's no music! (Which kind of defeats the point.) That was before I figured out how to make my own audio clips, and the only way I could incorporate music was in "found" form, meaning clips from the YouTube of yore -- and none of the YouTube clips came up! (I was pleased to see that the images of two larks, the skylark and the shore lark, did come up.) I tried an editorial trick: copying the HTML code into a text file and replacing all the "http"s with "https"es. Not only didn't it work, but -- as usually happens when I try to edit one of those old file -- I lost all the line breaks! It occurred to me, though, that since I had the external text file, I could manually reinsert all the damned missing line breaks, or at least as many as I could catch in the welter of code. So the thing might still be readable, if not listenable. And the two larks are still on view.

I'm tempted to try to rehab that post. It's so damned much work, and to what purpose? Plus, I would probably have to read what I wrote, which I always dread. Still, I love those three pieces so much, and it would be nice to make batches of proper audio clips for all three pieces. Hmmm.

WELL, I'VE GIVEN IN TO THE TEMPTATION

And mostly this follow-up is ready to go -- more than a rehabbing, more like a renovation, of the 2009 post. There was already, by the way, a follow-up post of sorts, in August 2010: "Vaughan Williams for a summer evening," and that one has music -- by then I'd begun making my own audio clips rather than borrowing posted YouTube clips. Obviously the music for the renovated version of the 2009 post consists entirely of newly made audio clips.

One immediate piece of business: We have to introduce our Third Lark, who comes to us courtesy of a fellow name of Shakespeare.

"Hark, hark! the lark at heaven's gate sings,
and Phoebus 'gins arise,
his steeds to water at those springs
on chaliced flowers that lies;
ad winking Mary-buds begin
to ope their golden eyes:
with every thing that pretty is,
my lady sweet, arise:
arise, arise!"

-- Cloten's song from Cymbeline, Act II, Scene 3

The composer Otto Nicolai (1810-1849), scrambling to come up with a workable subject for an opera he was contracted to compose for Vienna, hit on the idea of adapting one of Shakespeare's less prepossessing plays, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and somewhere in the succession of librettists he worked with to hammer out a libretto, the Shakespeare-worthy idea arose to insert Cloten's song from Cymbeline as a romance for the handsome-but-poor young suitor Fenton into Act II as a serenade for his beloved Anna Reich.

By way of a tease, I thought we'd start with a couple of older recordings (we've got some dynamite more modern performances coming up), starting with Karl Jörn (1873-1947), a tenor who straddled the heaver- and lighter-weight repertories, and continuing with a similarly mid-weight tenor, Peter Anders (1908-1954), heard here (importantly) in the late '30s, when the voice was still capable of seductive grace, not to be confused with the fairly awful 1943 recording of "Horch', die Lerche singt im Hain," which he's reduced to blasting his way through.

NICOLAI: Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives of Windsor): Act II, romance, Fenton, "Horch', die Lerche singt im Hain" ("Hark, the lark sings at heaven's gate")

[see the Shakespeare text above]

Karl Jörn (t), Fenton; sort-of-orchestral accompaniment. Victor, recorded 1916

Peter Anders (t), Fenton; Orchestra of the Deutsches Opernhaus Berlin, Walter Lutze, cond. Telefunken, recorded in the late 1930s


AND HERE'S OUR BONUS LARK --

Sometimes you wonder if there's any subject Schubert didn't write a song about. He set "Hark, hark, the lark" in a German translation by Ferdinand Mayerhofer.

SCHUBERT: "Ständchen" ("Serenade"): "Horch', horch', die Lerch' im Ätherblau" ("Hark, hark, the lark at heaven's gate"), D. 889

[again, see the Shakespeare text above]

Christine Schäfer, soprano; Graham Johnson, piano. From Vol. 26 of the Hyperion Schubert Edition ("An 1826 Schubertiad"), recorded 1994-96


SPEAKING OF SCHUBERT, I PROMISED FOLLOW-UP WITH THE SONG REUSED IN HIS "DEATH AND THE MAIDEN" QUARTET

First, let's listen again to the quartet movement.

SCHUBERT: String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, D. 810
(Death and the Maiden): ii. Andante con moto


Gabrieli Quartet (Kenneth Sillito and Brendan O'Reilly, violins; Ian Jewel, viola; Keith Harvey, cello). Classics for Pleasure-EMI, released 1971

Now back to the song that preceded it --

In form, it could hardly be simpler: one stanza for the maiden, one stanza -- set deeper in the voice -- for Death. And the singer has to have both voices at his/her disposal. I thought it might be interesting to trace Christa Ludwig's history with the song, from 1961, when was by nature the ideal maiden (though I have to say I get great pleasure, maybe even amusement, from the vocal imposture she attempts to impersonate the Devil with Gerald Moore in 1961 -- but is possible amusement what we're after here?), to the 1973 DG recording with Irwin Gage (the first of two Schubert LPs they made together, that year and the next), where the two voices seem kind of nicely in balance in this decidedly chilly performance, to her final concert, in 1994, when the maidenly voice was a reach for her but the voice of Death -- my goodness!

One thing worth listening for: despite the mediocre TV sound, the otherworldishly resonant accompaniment of Gerald Moore. I'm less sure about his brief commentary. Death as "a comforter," and "not something to be dreaded"? I can believe this is how Death sees things, and it's what he's trying to sell, but are we buying? Is this, for that matter, what Gerald M.'s creepily beautiful playing is telling us?

SCHUBERT: "Der Tod und das Mädchen" ("Death and the Maiden"), D. 531

[introduced by Gerald Moore; song at 0:35] Christa Ludwig, mezzo-soprano; Gerald Moore, piano. BBC-TV performance, 1961
Christa Ludwig, mezzo-soprano; Geoffrey Parsons, piano. EMI, recorded in Abbey Road Studio No. 1, London, Nov. 28-30, 1961

Christa Ludwig, mezzo-soprano; Irwin Gage, piano. DG, recorded in Tonstudio Rosenhügel, Vienna, June 1973

Christa Ludwig, mezzo-soprano; Charles Spencer, piano. RCA, recorded live at Ludwig's final concert, in the Grosser Saal of the Vienna Musikverein, Apr. 24, 1994

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